Tux's New Role: Terminator

One of the not too many survivors of the dot com technology downward spiral of the last half year, Linux growth continues to climb and finds friends in new places.

By now, we've all seen the signature
scene in Terminator, when a massive truck
explodes, apparently cremating the perfect robot from the
future--the movie's namesake--played by Arnold Schwartzeneggar.
This is the scene where the Terminator demonstrates his name by
walking calmly out of the wreckage. Now reduced to its purposeful
metal essence, it is no less determined, but a lot less
pretty.

That's roughly what happened to Linux in the year 2000. At
the dawn of the new millennium, Linux was personified in the press
by two of the most successful stock offerings in history: Red Hat
and VA Linux Systems. In August 1999, Red Hat went public with an
IPO that went straight to the sky. Cobalt Networks followed with
another strong showing in October. Then in December, the VA Linux
IPO racked up a record-setting $320 share price on opening day.
Andover.net had a strong IPO almost simultaneously, and in January
2000, VA Linux bought Andover for around a billion dollars. That
same month at the Javits Center in New York City, LinuxWorld Expo
was a gold rush mining town. As with the rest of the dot com boom,
promise was everything. With so much well-funded promise, who cared
about reality?

Then the dot com market crashed and kept crashing, like an
exploding gas tanker rolling down the side of a mountain. A lot of
companies didn't come out at the bottom. But the Linux companies
did, and so did Linux itself, even though a lot of the attractive
stuff was gone. Red Hat and VA Linux's stock prices were down
around $10 per share, but their sales were up. Cobalt had sold for
$2 billion to Sun and seemed healthier than ever. Linuxcare, Lineo
and TurboLinux all pulled out of the IPO market, but who wouldn't
when it's hardly there? Corel eased away from the Linux business,
but their problems could hardly be blamed on the operating system.
VA Linux and Penguin Computing backed farther away from the desktop
and laptop business, but with Dell, IBM and other mass market
hardware makers starting to put Linux on their branded laptops,
that was probably a good idea. The much smaller Tuxtops made the
same move, and got out of the laptop business.

But all of them were still in business. While Linux may have
looked a lot less pretty to Wall Street, it was no less appealing
to customers--or to the big hardware companies that fundamentally
aren't out to sell operating systems.

Linux persists because it's real. It was real before the dot
com craze, and it's still real after the crash. Demand is huge and
growing. Michael Dell claims that 10% of his company's servers run
Linux, and 40% of the customers at Dellhost.com choose Linux. IBM
says it is spending a billion (yes, that's with a b) dollars on
Linux development in 2001 alone. Sun Microsystems now has at least
one of its tentacles in the Linux camp, thanks to its acquisition
of Cobalt, which invented the server appliance category and whose
boxes all run Linux. At this writing the Linux-based search engine
Google is a runaway success--as well as one of Red Hat's biggest
customers. As of February (when I'm writing this), Google is
running on more than 7,000 Linux boxes. IBM reports that its S/390
mainframe (now rebranded as part of the Z series) can serve up many
thousands of simultaneous instances of Linux. This all amounts to a
bargain of sorts. We've seen claims that running Linux on a $7
million IBM mainframe saves about $40 million over a room full of
Suns running Solaris and doing roughly the same work.

At LinuxWorld Expo in January 2001, I talked to one IBM
engineer who used to work elsewhere but was attracted to Big Blue
because it's where the ``really cool Linux stuff'' is going on.
Another engineer told me that rallying around Linux blew away a lot
of the ``battling business unit'' politics between different server
hardware groups at the company. At the expo, IBM was the vendor
with the geek habitat: a floor filled with bean bag chairs on which
a herd of geeks lounged, talked and tapped away on laptops.

The expo itself was twice the size of last year's boom town.
The added acreage came mostly from three sources: 1) big mainstream
players, including IBM, Sun, SGI, HP and Borland; 2) embedded Linux
development companies like Lineo, MontaVista, LynuxWorks and
Timesys, plus a couple dozen less familiar names; and 3)
international hardware development companies deploying Linux in
everything from bookshelf servers to consumer electronics and
factory gear.

The reality-based message across the whole category now is
really quite simple: Linux is infrastructure. It's the way the
essentially free and open infrastructure we call the Net manifests
as an equally free, open and universal operating system. The
importance doesn't derive from displacing other operating systems
(Windows is also up in all categories), but rather from its virtues
as solid, well-understood and easily deployed infrastructural
building material. If you're selling anything other than operating
systems, it's probably good for you, in the same way as the
Internet is good for any business not directly competing directly
with it. Linux is a winner for just about everybody because just
about everybody can probably find a good way to put it to
use.

The proof is in the pudding you're holding in your hands
right now.

Doc
Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal and a coauthor
of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Trending Topics

Webinar: 8 Signs You’re Beyond Cron

Scheduling Crontabs With an Enterprise Scheduler
11am CDT, April 29th

Join Linux Journal and Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology at HelpSystems, as they discuss the eight primary advantages of moving beyond cron job scheduling. In this webinar, you’ll learn about integrating cron with an enterprise scheduler.